Senator Wiener's Statement on Demolition Day at Cupertino’s Vallco Mall, the Future Site of Thousands of Housing Units Streamlined by Senator Wiener’s SB 35

SB 35—authored by Senator Wiener— creates a streamlined approval process for housing when cities are not meeting the housing creation goals required by the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA).

October 11, 2018

San Francisco— Today, Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) issued the following statement on the first day of demolition at Cupertino’s Vallco Mall, which is the future site of at least 2,400 housing units, 50 percent of which will be affordable to low-income and very low-income people. This project is set to invoke SB 35—a bill authored by Senator Wiener in 2017—that creates a streamlined approval process for housing in cities that are not meeting their state-mandated housing goals:

“This type of project is exactly why I authored and we passed SB 35: to streamline and expedite housing approvals in cities that fall short of their housing goals. Cupertino, like the entire Bay Area, is in desperate need of housing of all kinds. The Vallco project includes historic amounts of market rate and affordable homes. It has stalled for years due to local opposition, and today marks an important milestone in moving beyond this opposition. If we are serious about digging ourselves out of our huge housing deficit, we need projects like this one. I look forward to the Vallco project, with its thousands of mixed income homes, moving forward.”